Irish ways.  It’s a blessing to me to think that my darling boy has attained the position which I always knew was his due, and for which I pinched myself to educate him.  You must bring me the little Bryan, that his grandmother may kiss him, one day.  Present my respectful blessing to her Ladyship his mamma.  Tell her she has got a treasure in her husband, which she couldn’t have had had she taken a duke to marry her; and that the Barrys and the Bradys, though without titles, have the best of blood in their veins.  I shall never rest until I see you Earl of Ballybarry, and my grandson Lord Viscount Barryogue.’

How singular it was that the very same ideas should be passing in my mother’s mind and my own!  The very title she had pitched upon had also been selected (naturally enough) by me; and I don’t mind confessing that I had filled a dozen sheets of paper with my signature, under the names of Ballybarry and Barryogue, and had determined with my usual impetuosity to carry my point.  My mother went and established herself at Ballybarry, living with the priest there until a tenement could be erected, and dating from ’Ballybarry Castle;’ which, you may be sure, I gave out to be a place of no small importance.  I had a plan of the estate in my study, both at Hackton and in Berkeley Square, and the plans of the elevation of Ballybarry Castle, the ancestral residence of Barry Lyndon, Esq., with the projected improvements, in which the castle was represented as about the size of Windsor, with more ornaments to the architecture; and eight hundred acres of bog falling in handy, I purchased them at three pounds an acre, so that my estate upon the map looked to be no insignificant one. [Footnote:  On the strength of this estate, and pledging his honour that it was not mortgaged, Mr. Barry Lyndon borrowed L17,000 in the year 1786, from young Captain Pigeon, the city merchant’s son, who had just come in for his property.  At for the Polwellan estate and mines, ’the cause of endless litigation,’ it must be owned that our hero purchased them; but he never paid more than the first L5000 of the purchase-money.  Hence the litigation of which he complains, and the famous Chancery suit of ‘Trecothick v.  Lyndon,’ in which Mr. John Scott greatly distinguished himself.-Ed.]

I also in this year made arrangements for purchasing the Polwellan estate and mines in Cornwall from Sir John Trecothick, for L70,000—­ an imprudent bargain, which was afterwards the cause to me of much dispute and litigation.  The troubles of property, the rascality of agents, the quibbles of lawyers, are endless.  Humble people envy us great men, and fancy that our lives are all pleasure.  Many a time in the course of my prosperity I have sighed for the days of my meanest fortune, and envied the boon companions at my table, with no clothes to their backs but such as my credit supplied them, without a guinea but what came from my pocket; but without one of the harassing cares and responsibilities which are the dismal adjuncts of great rank and property.